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A
Hey everyone. This week we wanted to share a new podcast we think you'll love. A gripping wrongful conviction story from ABC News in 2020. It's called the Snare. The Snare examines the murder of 18 year old Angie Dodge, who was killed in her apartment in Idaho Falls in 1996. As investigators hunted for her killer, DNA recovered from the crime scene pointed to an unidentified suspect. But despite the evidence, police built their case against another man, Chris Tapp, securing a conviction that later unraveled while the real killer remained at large. But despite the evidence, police built their case against another man, Chris Tapp, securing a conviction that later unraveled while the real killer remained at large. As years passed, Angie's mother Carol never gave up on a decade long mission to uncover the truth. It took 20 long years, but finally, through Carol's persistence and some incredible new DNA matching technology, Angie's real killer was put behind bars. You can hear the whole story, including audio of Chris Tapp's interrogation and so much more in this riveting new series. Keep listening here for the first episode and if you like what you hear, check out more by following the Snare in your favorite podcast app. That's the Snare. Now here's the episode.
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On a cold winter night in 1997, police in a small city in Idaho have brought a young man to the station to help answer some questions. His name is Chris Tapp. He shifts around in his chair inside a spare interrogation room, propping a baseball cap on the knee of his faded blue jeans. Chris is 20 years old. The detective asks if he's comfortable and says he can leave anytime.
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C
Not under arrest. You're not in trouble. You can get up and say, hey, I'm done. Take me home. Just want to kind of pick your brain and kind of go from there.
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The detective seems to think Chris knows something about the death of a young woman he knew. The brutal murder of 18 year old Angie Dodge, who'd been found stabbed and sexually assaulted in her apartment more than six months before. Chris is confused about why police would want to talk to him.
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What more can I say? I mean, I'm going to be helpful. I'm going to try to do everything I can, but I really don't know that much.
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But the detective doesn't appear to believe him. He shifts gears, saying if Chris is lying, he's gonna pay a heavy price.
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Starting to shape up that some heads are gonna probably roll a little bit and it appears yours is probably on the chopping block.
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He says things will only get worse if it turns out Chris is hiding something. But if he cooperates and fesses up now, then maybe police can throw him a lifeline.
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I can't make this promise to you, tell you that because of my position and everything, I could pull, attempt to pull some serious strings. Okay.
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Chris thought he was here to help the police, but now he's starting to realize this might not be a friendly conversation. He tries bargaining with the detective.
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I'll take a lie detector test. I would find anything that would just verify what I said. You can take it to court. I'm being a scared little man.
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Chris has just said he's a scared little man. He's also volunteered to take a lie detector test. Soon detectives will take him up on that offer and it will set him and others on a dark path. A path they could never have predicted. From abc audio and 20, I'm maggie ruley. This is the snare. Episode 1 peacekeeper. In June 1996, young people in Idaho Falls, Idaho were starting to settle into summer. Jeremy Sargis, Angie Dodge's classmate all through high school, was one of them.
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It's an outdoorsy place. It was a good place to grow up. We all were dorks back in the day, you know, we all had good times and hooky bobbing and water fights and yeah, driving around with your feet hanging out the window.
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Idaho Falls is a town of around 50,000, not far from the Grand Tetons and Yellowstone National Park. It's known for having some of the best fly fishing in the country and is home to Idaho's oldest rodeo, the Warbonnet Roundup. The town is named after a set of man made waterfalls in the Snake river, which cuts it in half.
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My friends and I spent a lot of time hanging out down at the river. Being kids, we seem to all get along really good.
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Right along the river there's a sprawling white Mormon temple. It's one of the town's defining features. There's a big Latter Day Saints community in Idaho Falls and the temple with its massive steeple towers over everything else. But for Jeremy Sargis and his friends, the Snake river was what mattered. In the summer of 96, everybody kind
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of cruised around earlier in the morning to see who'd stopped and was swimming or picnicking. And then one person would stop and another person would stop and you know, sometimes by the end of the night they would. There wouldn't be anywhere to park. I mean, it's certain points there was hundreds of people down there hanging out, having a good time.
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Angie Dodge Hung out at the river too.
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You'd have the cowboys over here and the jocks over here. And Angie was a social butterfly. So she would be in all the groups. It wouldn't be just our clique that she would be with, she would be with them all.
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Tim Quick was one of Angie Dodge's best friends.
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Angie's mom and my mom went to high school together. So I met Angie at a very young age and then we grew up together. Families did a lot together.
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Tim says. That summer, Angie was really feeling her freedom. She was 18 and had a job at a makeup store in town called Beauty for All Seasons. She answered calls and processed orders. And when she wasn't working, she was socializing at the river.
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Being a teenager in Idaho Falls was like freedom. It was like you could go hang out where you wanted. You could pretty much do what you wanted.
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But Tim says the real taste of freedom for Angie that summer came in the form of an apartment. She had moved out of her family home into her own place. After the boat docks officially closed at 10pm, Angie and her friends would go to someone's house to hang out. In the weeks leading up to Angie's murder, her new apartment was one of those hangout spots. Angie's place was on the top floor of an older wood shingled house with creaky floors. The bathroom had a water stained porcelain sink and pink floral wallpaper. Angie had only been living there for a few weeks. She hadn't even gotten a real bed yet and was still sleeping on a mattress on the floor. Still, she'd set up her kitchen with a spice rack. The apartment was small and it wasn't fancy, but it was hers and it was what she could afford. The rent was just $250 a month. Tim remembers how happy she was about getting her own place.
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You would have thought she was moving into a mansion. She was super excited. It was the best house in the world. Just pure joy. When she had her own place.
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On the morning of June 13, Angie was supposed to clock into her shift at Beauty for all seasons at 7am but she didn't, which was unlike her. So by 7:30, her co workers tried calling her home phone. No answer. They left a message on her answering machine. They tried calling her again a few hours later. Still no answer. That's when two of her co workers decided to go to her house and check on her. They checked the front door, which was closed but unlocked. They made their way up the carpeted stairs and walked to her bedroom. But instead of finding that Angie had overslept. Her co workers found Angie's body lying on the floor, Covered in blood. They rushed to Angie's home phone to call 911. Around 11:15 that morning, Detective Jeff Pratt was sitting at his desk following up on some case reports when he got a call from his sergeant.
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And he. He basically told me, we have a suspicious death. I want you to come and process this crime scene.
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Pratt had first joined the Idaho falls police department as a patrol officer. By the time he was promoted to detective in 1996, he'd been on the force for 15 years. As part of his new detective assignment, he'd taken some photography classes to learn how to document crime scenes. After hanging up the phone, Pratt grabbed his personal camera, a 35 millimeter Pentax, and drove over to Andrew's apartment in an unmarked car. Pratt was familiar with Angie's address, 444i Street. He'd lived nearby when he was starting out as a rookie cop.
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That's what we call the lettered streets. They follow the alphabetic letters. And it had seen better days.
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By the time Angie moved in, the neighborhood was kind of dilapidated and had a reputation for being unsafe. There were reports of drug dealing and other crime. When detective Pratt pulled up to Angie's house, He was met by a handful of law enforcement officers who'd already been inside.
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They gave me a briefing of that they had been in the building, that they had found the victim, and cautioned me that it was a pretty graphic and violent scene. A lot of blood.
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At this point, Pratt didn't know the name of the victim or anything about Angie. His job was to document evidence from the crime scene, and so he focused his pentax camera as he made his way inside. At first, he didn't see any obvious clues that something was off.
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I noticed that the apartment is really clean. It seems to be fairly orderly.
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Nothing seemed out of place, and there was no sign of forced entry. But when detective Pratt turned a corner into Angie's bedroom, the outlines of a violent crime scene came into focus. There was blood splattered on the walls next to Angie's body. A white wicker laundry basket piled high with stuffed animals, Including a blood stained teddy bear Tucked under Angie's left arm. A white stuffed bunny rabbit. Still, there were no signs of a struggle. A pink table lamp on Angie's nightstand Appeared to be untouched.
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The room was pretty much intact. The bed was messed up and the bedding was, you know, flowing off of it, the sheets and blankets. But other than that, in the immediate vicinity Within a few feet around the victim was the only real chaos of the room. I can see that she has some extensive lacerations or incisions, stab wounds, and there is a horrific wound to the throat. Obviously a lot of blood spatter.
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He documented more than a dozen stab wounds, including a six inch gash across Angie's left breast, which was exposed. There were a few small defensive wounds on her arms and hands. Angie's purple sweatpants had been pulled down to her knees. She wasn't wearing any underwear. It appeared she'd been sexually assaulted. And most striking of all, it was a 14 inch gash across Angie's throat. Detective Pratt had a theory about that.
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The injury to Angie's throat, I believe really early on, would have severed the larynx and the voice box. I don't believe she could have screamed. I've always thought that it was probably the worst case I've ever seen, even to now, you know, a number of years later, it's still one of the worst cases I've ever seen is the one that sticks with me. It's the nightmare. It's the one that you desperately want to solve. To know I can't imagine anyone wanting to do that, to cut someone like that.
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As Detective Pratt took in the totality of the crime scene, it seemed to him that ultimately whoever had done this had been motivated by pent up emotion and rage. He thought this was the type of crime that was likely perpetrated by a lone killer. Still, he noticed this pattern in the blood spatter along one wall in Angie's bedroom. That made him question this lone killer theory. Imagine if you flicked a wet paintbrush at a wall. If someone happened to be standing in front of that wall, the spatter would land on them and leave a blank space on the wall behind them, essentially an outline or a void. That's what Detective Pratt noticed on this one wall in Angie's bedroom. And it made him wonder if maybe the killer hadn't acted alone.
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So it's possible that there was something or someone in the path of where the blood was spraying that created a voided shadow. So I couldn't out and out categorically say there is more than one person, but it kind of appeared that that was a possibility.
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Over the next 24 hours, Detective Pratt and Idaho Falls Law Enforcement collected physical evidence from the crime scene. They swapped blood from the wall in Angie's body. They collected samples of semen and samples of hair from a hair clip, a pink fuzzy toilet seat cover, and from
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Angie's purple sweatpants we found one hair that we believed was a pubic hair that was obviously different than the others.
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DNA technology was just starting to emerge at the time. Detective Pratt says he knew collecting all these samples could lead to a DNA match and to Angie's murderer.
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The killer absolutely left his culling card there.
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According to police, officers in Idaho, Falls were mostly used to dealing with thefts or drug crimes, especially meth. The year before Angie's death, there had only been two murders in the town. And while the police investigation began, Angie's family, friends and community began asking their own questions. Why would anyone want to hurt Angie? And who could have committed this brutal murder? The night before Angie died, she visited her mom, Carol. In photos you can see how similar they blonde hair, heart shaped faces, and gray blue eyes. Angie was Carol's only daughter and the baby of the family. She had three older brothers.
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You know, they'd wrestled, they played football.
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Carol says Angie was tough and didn't take no for an answer. She was known for being outspoken. If someone was being pushed around, Angie would have something to say about it.
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She'd get right in your face. She'd tell you how it is because she really went through some hard times when she was younger because she was big for her age.
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But she says that toughness came with a lot of compassion.
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She would always, always bring a stranger home and they would cook and do all sorts of things and listen to music. She'd see some new kid come to school or, you know, and she, she was very compassionate.
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Angie was also serious, determined and seemed eager to grow up. She'd graduated from high school with honors the year before and was working full time. Angie was interested in entrepreneurship and had taken some classes at Idaho State. Actually, one of the pieces of evidence detectives collected from her apartment was a textbook about entrepreneurship sitting on her nightstand.
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There is no doubt that Angie would have become an entrepreneur. She was very business minded and when she was a freshman in high school, she ran our finances for a whole year. When I see her day planner, she had her money. This is what I owe. This is how much money I have in the bank. This is what I need to write checks for. It was like she was so organized with her money.
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Angie had secured her apartment and she'd also bought a car, a Chevy Geo Metro.
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You know, it wasn't an expensive car, but it was a brand new car and she was just as excited as can be that she got a loan.
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At 18, Angie's car was called the boat.
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This is Angie's longtime friend Tim Quick again.
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She would pull up to anything with her foot. Out the window of her car, you would see her foot and then you'd see her face. And it's just big smile, like, I've arrived, the party has started, it has begun. You know, it's just like pure joy.
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Tim recalls how special Angie's smile was.
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Her smile would light up any room you were ever in.
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Aside from being outgoing and boisterous, he says Angie was also a peacekeeper.
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I used to get in a lot of scuffles when I was younger. Angie would step in all the time and tell me it wasn't worth it, tell me it wasn't worth the trouble I was gonna get into or worth hurting myself or the other person for. She was always a peacemaker, always, always wanted everyone to be happy.
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Tim says this continued all the way through high school, then to Angie's time hanging out at the river, where he says it wasn't uncommon for people to get into fights or for the cops to show up.
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And Angie would love to get in the middle of it, to break it up, just to make peace so we wouldn't get removed from our hangout.
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Tim says Angie and her mom were both strong willed and opinionated. And Angie had argued with her mom a few weeks before her death.
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One of the reasons why she moved out is because she disobeyed a house rule. And she said, why don't you just let me grow up? And, you know, just, I'm 18, mother. Just let me grow up. That's how we learn, you know.
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On the night of June 12, 1996, the sun was setting and Carol Dodge was outside the house doing yard work.
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And I heard her come through the back way up the patio. And her and I were always known to be barefooted. We just never wore shoes. But she had her Birkenstocks on. And anyway, she just says, mom, I'm here.
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Carol hadn't seen her daughter since the fight, since Angie had moved into her own apartment.
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I was so grateful that she had come over because I hadn't seen her for three weeks.
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Carol says Angie had come over to make peace, to put their big fight behind them.
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We sat down and we talked and I just took a hold of her and she laid her head on my shoulder and I rocked her and I said, I'm so glad you're not mad at me anymore. And she just looked up. She said, not even in a blue moon. That was a God given night.
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As Carol held her only daughter, Angie confided in her mom about Something that had been weighing on her.
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She says, you know, Mom, I've done something really stupid. And I said, sweetheart, we all do things stupid. Look at the stupid things that I've done. And she says, no, mom, this is really stupid.
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Carol didn't ask Angie what that stupid thing was for years. She says she would regret this decision a million times over.
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I keep going back when Angie said, I've done something really stupid. What is it that she did that possibly was the reason why she was killed?
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Before long, police would ask Carol about these last moments with Angie. What did she remember about Angie that night?
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All I can remember is how her. How her hair smelled and how she smells so clean and just. I remember how cute her hair looked that night.
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So the time Angie passed away, I found out by her mother calling me. It was before all the news stations came on with it and before. All I can remember really, is Carol. I said, hello, And Carol said, she's gone. It was one of the hardest days of my life. I would love to know Angie now. That's the hardest part. But who in their right mind would want to kill someone with such a pleasant. Someone so pleasant, someone so joyful, someone so perfect for life, someone just someone that could bring happiness to the saddest moment in someone's life? Carol was destroyed. I've got a daughter that's the same age as Angie was when she was killed. I can't even imagine what that would be like.
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Tim says he and Angie's other friends wanted to do whatever they could to help Carol. And in the days and weeks after Angie's murder, helping Carolina would mean trying to find Angie's killer. A couple of days after Angie's murder, her friends and family gathered for a memorial service. In grainy video footage, you can see people wiping away tears and carrying big flower arrangements, a mix of carnations, roses and lilies. The police were there, too, including Detective Jeff Pratt, the officer who took photos of the crime scene at Angie's apartment on this day. He's wearing a gray suit and navy blue tie. He has his Pentax camera strapped around his neck. Pratt and another detective are here to investigate. They're watching, even recording, with a video camera. Could Angie's killer be mingling among her friends and family? After the service ends, police follow the crowd outside to a nearby cemetery with the video camera. It's a windy June day, and the camera zooms in on different faces as if it's hunting for clues. At that time, there were no suspects. The police chief was open about that when he previously spoke to the press.
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It was a brutal homicide and we
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do not have a suspect at this time.
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And there is reason for people to be cautious right now.
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And people in Idaho Falls were cautious. Jeremy Sargis remembers the fear in the community.
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Nothing like that happens in Idaho Falls. It just doesn't. There's some crazy stuff that happens in every town, but. And that was pretty extreme. I know that I started carrying a knife. It scared people. It really did.
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He also remembers how quickly rumors started swirling about who could have killed Angie.
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Everybody had an idea of who might have done it and what might have happened. And, you know, I guess that's just the nature of people. I remember the police pulling in hundreds of and hundreds of people for questioning. All of us, really.
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What was highly unusual for this case and especially unusual for Idaho Falls is it was a whodunit.
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This is Brian Clark, a reporter in eastern Idaho who has covered the Angie Dodge case.
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There were no witnesses. There was physical evidence, but no obvious way to tell who it came from.
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Brian Clark says police looked at other items found in Angie's apartment.
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Like a planner, they wanted to find out what her routine had been, who she'd been speaking with.
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There were also voicemails on her home phone.
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And so they started looking into the people who had called police.
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Officers interviewed Angie's family and her ex boyfriend and cleared them. They also interviewed her neighbors and friends. Basically, they wanted to talk to anyone who knew Angie. But after all that, they didn't identify any suspects. As they did all these interviews, investigators collected DNA samples from around 100 people trying to get a match to the physical evidence from the crime scene. But officers weren't the only ones asking around and trying to figure out who had killed Angie. Brian Clark says Carol Dodge got very involved in the hunt for her daughter's murderer.
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She started hitting the streets like a cop, interviewing people, trying to find out who killed her daughter. She tracked down people. She started looking into the drug scene in the area and finding people who were involved in the drug scene, interviewing them. She put 2,500 flyers up offering rewards for information.
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I'd go home three or four, five o' clock in the morning.
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Tim Quick remembers helping Carol Dodge with these efforts.
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We thought we were our own investigative team went and asked questions, everyone, anyone who would know.
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Still, as the summer of 1996 went on, neither the police nor Angie's family and friends had any leads. Summer became fall, fall became winter, and there were no suspects, no arrests. The investigation seemed to be at a standstill until one day in January 1997 when Idaho falls police learned about a crime that seemed strangely similar. There was an arrest hundreds of miles away in Nevada of a man who hung out down by the Snake river, too. A man who knew Angie Dodge. A man who was even captured on video at Angie's funeral. The Snare is a production of ABC Audio in 2020, hosted by me, Maggie Ruley. Produced by Camille Peterson and Sabrina Fang, with help from Annalisa Linder and Emily Schutz. Edited by Tracy Samuelson. Our supervising producer is Susie Lu. Music by Evan Viola. Mixing by Bob Mallory. Special thanks to Katie Dendas, Janice Johnston, Nancy Rosenbaum, Sasha Aslanian, Suzanne Dacunto and Michelle Margulis. Josh Cohan is our director of podcast programming. Amy McNiff is our executive producer.
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A
That was a preview of this Snare from ABC News in 2020. Check out more episodes by following this Snare in your favorite podcast.
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Apparent.